The central program objective for the clients, Villanova University and PennDOT, was to provide safe passage for more than 7,000 pedestrians who cross this intersection daily. As a result, traffic flow on Route 30 would be made safer by separating pedestrian and vehicular traffic and widening the highway with left turn lanes. As a consequence of the requirement for the project from a safety standpoint, the University desired the crossing to become a new campus entry, stitching the north and south campuses back together.
The central program objective for the clients, Villanova University and PennDOT, was to provide safe passage for more than 7,000 pedestrians who cross this intersection daily. As a result, traffic flow on Route 30 would be made safer by separating pedestrian and vehicular traffic and widening the highway with left turn lanes. As a consequence of the requirement for the project from a safety standpoint, the University desired the crossing to become a new campus entry, stitching the north and south campuses back together.
Landscaping strategy was central to the perception of the new space as a sequential pedestrian passage into the main campus. Below the existing ground, the landscape idea was to juxtapose vertical infrastructural components such as roadway and ramp retaining walls with continuous sloped embankments of ivy, sustained even under the bridge by supplemental light and water. The landscape has been addressed at the point of view of both the pedestrian and the automobile. The existing automobile landscape consisted of the traditional campus to the north, with its broad pastoral lawns with mature specimen quality trees, field-houses and stadium to the east, and a view of primarily parked cars to the south. The new automobile landscape was intended to unify and augment the campus identity, and act as a foil to the existing campus landscape. The pedestrian passage landscape, largely unseen from the car, belongs neither to the auto context nor the traditional campus context and has therefore been given a landscape that belongs to neither.
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